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Welcome to the age of social media on the internet, where not only does stuff *not* stay secret for long, it spreads faster and farther than ever before, and to people who otherwise wouldn't give a fit because a friend or family member they care about *does*.

We're sorry we did this in a way that got national publicity. Next time, we'll do it in a way that is less likely to do so, such as sending these enemy combatants [as the information they disseminated was clearly only to aid terrorists] to Iraq/Afghanistan/etc and apply some information retrieval techniques on them.

Their family may notice they've gone, but they won't know where they've gone to...

The whole DHS are a bunch of thugs. An ICE agent recently blew through a stop sign [ivpressonline.com] and killed 3 women. They're trying to blame it on his driving with tinted windows at night. Why would a run-of-the-mill GOV need tinted windows?!

Is it me, or does the "Federal Agent" badge look really tarnished now, from the technology vantage? I mean, who out there *can't* image a hard drive? I'll bet they broke it because they weren't grounded. Besides, opening a laptop these days, that's a difficult task. Need more than a few certifications, I say. Last time mine was professionally serviced, it needed a motherboard replacement after it was fixed. So, I wonder if the federal agents just took the laptop to the Geek Squad and asked them to do

One of these days government agencies will realize that they can't pull shit like they did back in the 50's era of commie hunting. Information and public dissent spreads like wildfire thanks to the internet and social media. The quicker the assholes that run our government learn this, the happier everybody will be.

They'll only realize that when people actually start revolting against the TSA violently for this kind of thing.When a violation of someone's rights leads to a protest in Washington that results in the riot police being called, maybe they'll listen. They're going to be more than happy to do this exact same thing int he future. They'll go after someone, get the information they want, then "apologize" and blame it on poor judgment of some random whipping boy in the agency. They'll insist that they were st

One of these days government agencies will realize that they can't pull shit like they did back in the 50's era of commie hunting.

I'm pretty sure that a precondition for them to realize that they can't pull shit like they did in the 50s is that they actually can't pulls hit like they did in the 50s. Other than a few minor noisy issues like this one, on the whole, they're doing just fine with Tail-Gunner Joe's playbook.

"We didn't realize our dick move would receive so much public attention."

I am not quite sure that was their motivation. Possibly paranoia, possibly reality, I suspect the laptop was modified just a wee bit...

Frischling says the laptop was returned to him with “tons and tons of bad sectors” and a corrupt operating system. The audio on his computer has also stopped working, and a red light glows from the audio jack.

I am not exactly sure what audio jack on what laptop has a red light in it that glows... weird...

Optical audio port. There's one in my old laptop too. It tended to be switched on when I installed a new system. Since he mentions a broken OS, he's probably reinstalled and doesn't have the right drivers.

Optical audio port. There's one in my old laptop too. It tended to be switched on when I installed a new system. Since he mentions a broken OS, he's probably reinstalled and doesn't have the right drivers.

Or MAYBE, the TSA infected him with the HAL 9000 virus.

"I'm sorry Steven, I can't let you listen to that."

Ah yes... forgot about optical audio ports... most of our customers dont have such high end machines.

Frischling says the laptop was returned to him with tons and tons of bad sectors and a corrupt operating system. The audio on his computer has also stopped working, and a red light glows from the audio jack.

So was that metric tons, short tons, or shit tons of bad sectors? I mean, it's bad enough we all can't decide on what the fuck a megabyte is...

Since their new guideline was published everyone is going to know about these changes in security. If only these bloggers would have kept quiet, the only ones who would know would be the millions who go through the airports. Someone has to pay for a lapse in secrecy of this magnitude!

What the heck is the security justification for heads of state, or their families to be exempt?

Two words: Diplomatic Passport. Followed by another two words: Diplomatic Incident.

We know that the US doesn't have much regard for the rights of plebes but, since the generally-accepted retaliation for mistreating foreigners with diplomatic status is other countries mistreating your persons of diplomatic status, they're going to try and avoid messing with heads-of-state if possible. It just gets ugly.
Also,

Not necessarily. Diplomatic privilege only occurs when a person's diplomatic status is recognised by the receiving nation. The Wikipedia article on diplomatic immunity [wikipedia.org] is pretty good at explaining things.

A good example is diplomatic couriers, who have diplomatic passports but are still subject to the ordinary treatment. What is not searched is the diplomatic pouch. The document says as much, and says that the pouch must be in the courier's line of sight at all times while the courier is being processed.

And this time they'll remember to amend the subpoena to make it illegal for the recipient to talk to anyone but their lawyer about the existence of the subpoena. i.e: double secret subpoena!

IANAL but you can't send someone a document to force them to shut up. Even in the military, you have to swear an oath and/or sign a document that you won't reveal classified information. In business, you sign a non disclosure agreement. However you have to GIVE consent. It can't be assumed.

Cooperate - and get two hours of grilling and a borked laptop. And the half-assed apology.Tell the feds to go get a clue about procedure and return with a warrant - get the half-assed apology and keep your electronics in working order.

Don't cooperate and get designated a security threat. Try not to pretend that the system works. It doesn't. This was a rare instance where a person who stood up for his rights won in the end. It doesn't usually end up like that. The TSA could have easily filed the obstruction of justice charge, even though they knew it would be BS. They would then drop it a month later and face no consequences. Then the blogger would have to try to get the money in legal fees back from the government. Fat chance! A broken l

. . . but someone should have to fall on his or her sword over this. If those field agents acted on their own, it would be they; if not, then whoever they worked for that authorized the tactics should be holding a sign saying "WILL WAND YOUR CROTCH FOR FOOD."

Drennan also promised to make sure the administration resolved issues that Frischling has been having with his laptop ever since the agents seized it to image the hard drive.

Frischling says the laptop was returned to him with "tons and tons of bad sectors" and a corrupt operating system. The audio on his computer has also stopped working, and a red light glows from the audio jack.

Damn, I bet his machine is full of spying devices, including one where the audio card used to be.

Hard to imagine installing a spying device with a glowing red LED, but then the TSA isn't known for its stunning efficiency. More likely the just screwed up his computer and some standard warning light was activated.

They should owe him a new computer and say 100 hours of consulting time to ensure that his data and software are properly transfered to the new computer. Say $30K total.

If it's a MacBook, then there's a little flap at the end of the audio jack. Behind that flap is an LED that is used to transmit SPDIF audio over fiber. (The Apple SPDIF adapter is longer than a standard audio jack, and pushes past the jack to the LED).

If you are exceptionally violent with the machine, I suppose it's possible to damage or dislodge the flap, which would cause red light to shine out the audio jack whenever the sound card is on. Between this, a broken keyboard, and a "ton of bad sectors," it sounds like they took the Israeli approach [slashdot.org] to handling people it thinks don't agree with its tactics. Except the TSA managed to actually destroy data.

It sounds like they knew they wouldn't find anything, so a few "accidental" drops to the laptop was their preferred interrogation method. While I do find this works sometimes on PC's, it rarely works on a laptop.

It sounds like they were looking to punish him for posting it, rather than actually looking for information.

At one company I worked for, we received a few computers from Europe. They had been shipped separately, just because that's how they arrived for shipment. One showed up at our office in pieces. The pieces appeared ok, but not a single part worked. I'm pretty sure they thought we were smuggling something inside the computer. Come on, was it necessary to remove and manhandle the motherboard, just to see that it didn't contain any drugs? We didn't get an apology, nor reimbursement for it. the US Customs stance was, "That's the way we got it, when we inspected it.". Ya, right.

Consistency is not in their methodology though. We shipped a lot of equipment around to various locations. Most got there fine. The occasional piece was mishandled by the shipping companies. Some were held for weeks by customs. It makes it hard to work, when you ship say 20 pieces, and only 15 show up on time.

If you are exceptionally violent with the machine, I suppose it's possible to damage or dislodge the flap, which would cause red light to shine out the audio jack whenever the sound card is on.

No violence necessary. And there's no flap. It's a microswitch that detects whether the longer connector is there or not. If that switch gets knocked into the wrong position, the computer assumes there's a digital connector in place and enables that hardware.

This happens occasionally [macrumors.com] to people. The fix is to take

As much as the conspiracy theorist in me would like to believe they added spying devices to the computer, chances are they just screwed up the hard drive in shipping. Of course either way it's unacceptable and they owe him the value of his time, fixing the thing, and lost data.

then they should be fired for being idiots since1 removing the hard drive is documented online2 only a true idiot would try to get a FORENSICS QUALITY image from a system without some sort of write blocking inplace3 a binary dump of the drive does not care about the disc format

Only if the public wakes up and helps out. Props to this guy for not shutting his mouth, but there have been plenty of other people who continued to speak out only to have the public more worried about the bread and circuses.

The guy who didn't cave and refused to bend over still has his working computer hardware.

As always "never talk to the police" wins again. Even when you have done *nothing* wrong (and not just in the domain they are telling you they care about, across all domains) there are only two things you should say to the police:

1. No you may not search that/open that/have that/come inside.2. I'm not saying anything without my lawyer present.

It's really sad how true this is. I used to think 'I'll just comply and everything will be perfectly fine and I can be on my way.' Then somewhere along the way I realized that cops who want to do improper searches are assholes to start with, and they've already decided you are guilty and will treat you as such. If you make them do the paperwork first, then there -is- paperwork to show that it happened and you can't get into a situation where it's their word against yours that it even happened.

As for the laptop... I know when they search a car or house, they have to put things back as they are. Does that not apply to electronics as well?

When I worked as a civilian for the police department, part of computer services was officers involved in computer crimes. While I was there, to the best of my knowledge, they always took great care in disassembling systems and mirroring drives so that the computers were functional when returned (original disks were NEVER booted). They were all computer geeks and didn't want to disrupt things for the user when they got their stuff back. Not to mention they would have to defend their practices in court re

Darn right.
No, I do not consent to any search.
Am I free to go?
Lawyer.
Those are pretty much the only things you should ever say.
For why you should never talk to the police ( a class from law school), go here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc [youtube.com]
And support the http://aclu.org/ [aclu.org]

That’s because, as I always say: It’s not about what you have to hide. It’s about what they want to find.

Cardinal Richelieu also had a nice saying about seven lines of the honest man being enough, to find something, to let him hang.

The “funniest” thing is, that the exact description of what the TSA does to people, is “terror”. They’re the real terrorists. But as all terrorists, they have more powerful backroom figures who control the big picture. The “terrorists” are just straw-men.

Well, the TSA is more successful in the actual goal of terrorism: To install fear in the hearts of US citizens, and destroy the civil base that your society was grounded upon, once upon a time. They put 100,000s of people on secret watch lists and the US society let that happen.

In my country, such behaviour once was typical of its "secret state police". That part of my country was then named German Democratic Republic, and then Americans scowled about these so-called `socialistic' states (who were never s

By the way: You know that Bin Laden was a CIA agent, right? You know that the weapons they use, were paid for by the US military. (I know this from first-hand sources, since I have a photo of my father, with a US rocket launcher, trying to free his country from the Russian invasion. [Unfortunately, I have no contact with him anymore. Thanks for making the cold war hot in our country. {I don’t blame the people, I blame a part of some g

Exactly. The talking heads call it a "war on terror" and all the while it's our own government who tries to keep us afraid with colored charts and media scaremongering. Then some fucking moron tries to blow up a plane and ends up lighting his nuts on fire and the government agents have an excuse to further terrorize the citizens. They will continue to let the occasional bomber through every now and then, and the cycle will continue.

There is an old saying that applies here: Never ascribe to malice that which can readily be explained by incompetance.

The TSA believes in what they are doing, as does the DHS. They are not creating increasingly inconvenient security measures to instill terror, they are honestly trying to prevent the next attack.

However, their misguided attempts at this do not prevent new attacks, it simply terrorizes the citizens, making their lives worse.

There is nothing TSA has in place right now that would stop hijackers from sneaking box cutters on to airplanes once again and hijacking the plane. I know this because in the past year a friend of mine accidentally snuck a box cutter through at least 6 TSA screenings, maybe even more since he wasn't sure exactly when he put the thing in his bag. The only measure that has been implimented that would have any effect at all is the pilots locking the cockpit door. That's it.

The hijackings wouldn't get very far today, however, in spite of the TSA's ineptitude, because the conventional wisdom for what to do in a hijacking has changed. It used to be thought that it was best to wait it out, and in the end everyone goes home. Today we know we need to act immediately, and while a few may get hurt, there is no scenario where an entire plane full of passengers is defeated by a hijacker.

So what do we gain from TSA? Nothing, that's what. Just keep the cockpit locked and act when someone tries to hijack the plane. Done. Flying is safe once again.

The hijackings wouldn't get very far today, however, in spite of the TSA's ineptitude, because the conventional wisdom for what to do in a hijacking has changed. It used to be thought that it was best to wait it out, and in the end everyone goes home. Today we know we need to act immediately, and while a few may get hurt, there is no scenario where an entire plane full of passengers is defeated by a hijacker.

*standing ovation! wins '+n Most Insightful' Award, due to me not currently having mod points*Well

As always "never talk to the police" wins again. Even when you have done *nothing* wrong (and not just in the domain they are telling you they care about, across all domains) there are only two things you should say to the police:

1. No you may not search that/open that/have that/come inside.2. I'm not saying anything without my lawyer present.

I see the wisdom in this, but there's a question I've always wanted to ask the experts who advocate this approach. What if you have a serious interest in the police completing their investigation as quickly and effectively as possible? For example, suppose your child has been abducted while in the custody of your ex-spouse. You are innocent and want the culprit found, but you also know that statistics and profiling will tell the police that you yourself are the most likely suspect. Do you spill all the info

If the police are trying to find your missing kid then the benefits probably outweight the costs. Most parents would trade not just anything by everything to get their kid back, so most will likely do all they can to provide information.

The *never* is a little extreme, but it's the safe default. And not talking should be the usual response unless the circumstances are very strange.

What it really boils down to I guess is "never talk to the police if they are the ones wanting to

If the cops have showed up at your doorstep and you didn't call them; they've already decided you're guilty and are there to try to pin something on you; even if it's not your hypothetical kidnapping. And the legal system is simply too complicated now for a layman to safely navigate. So yes... a lawyer is an imperative. (And yeah, as you say, in your scenario you're already and automatically a suspect.)

Even if you have information you do want the cops to have, it's safest and smartest to insist on being

The concern isn't that they'll keep you arrested or that they'll use "he wanted a lawyer" as evidence, but that by looking bad to them they'll make you the prime suspect and focus their efforts on you rather than on whoever actually did the kidnapping. Rather than searching for whoever did it, the GP is concerned that they'll focus their efforts on trying to get something solid on you.

That said, even if you do get the assholes, I think that one of their superiors would be more concerned with covering their

This is a no-concern. Honestly, look bad in whose eyes? Unless they have evidence, they can't keep you arrested. In court, they can't use "he wanted a lawyer" as evidence. So what if they don't like you?

To paraphrase Chris Rock, "Why didn't Kobe use Johnnie Cochran?" "Well, if you use Johnnie Cochran, you like guilty!" "Sure you do, but you're at home. If I gotta choose between looking innocent in jail, and looking guilty at the mall, I know which way I'm going."

Instead of throwing people's laptops around, these guys need to get to work. There is plenty of work to go around, from airports to every other kind of transportation facility you can think of.

Federal agencies are full of people who want to carry and gun and work security, since it's easier to stomp around with a badge than to do the drudge work of investigation. Every agency wants to have a police force of its own.

TSA is a special case, since it actually is a sort of police force. So put these smart guy agents on the front line, at airport screening lines, where their elite abilities can be better appreciated. And shorten waiting times.

As I mentioned yesterday [slashdot.org]. the subpoena probably wasn't valid. Once one of the recipients announced he would challenge it in court, the TSA probably withdrew it because they were going to look even dumber when a Federal judge threw it out.

There are some real questions about a law enforcement organization having administrative subpoena power.
In criminal investigations, subpoenas should come from a judge.
Congress has repeatedly refused FBI requests for that power. I don't think that Homeland Security has it, either. But regulatory agencies with narrow remits often have it, so they can demand records relevant to whatever they regulate. The Department of Transportation had it for use in safety investigations and such. Typically they'd be asking for maintenance records.

When Homeland Security picked up the Transportation Safety Agency from the Department of Transportation, they got DoT's administrative subpoena authority in the transfer. That's what Homeland Security was trying to use here. That clearly went beyond Congressional intent. And in any case, the subpoena hadn't been approved by one of the short list of people authorized to approve it.

The blurb you make insinuates that they "caved in" when in fact one of the bloggers gave up their laptop so in all likelihood they got the info they wanted off that laptop and that's why they dropped the subpoena.

LITTLE BROTHER, Detroit, Sunday -- The American-based terrorist group "Department of Homeland Security" (the Arabic term for "Department of Homeland Security") has successfully hobbled the American economy once more [newstechnica.com].

The hardware is back but whats loaded onto it?
Its an old trick to search something and give it back with a logger or spyware.
Then raid again/sneak and peek, or have an upload of the log at a later date.
ebay the hardware asap or take to a security expert and then ebay.